Women's cancer rates rise

Findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association show that lung cancer has reached epidemic proportions among women. Now it kills more women than breast and ovarian cancer combined. At the same time, lung cancer rates for men have decreased.

Oncologists think women may metabolize carcinogens differently from men, making them more susceptible to the disease. The lung-cancer rates cannot be fully explained by women's smoking patterns. Women who never smoked get lung cancer more often than men who never smoked.

Reducing bladder cancer risk

Bladder cancer is the fourth-leading cancer killer among men, but getting vitamin E from food appears to cut the risk by half for both men and women.

Research funded by the state of Texas shows that people whose vitamin E intake was in the top 25 percent had half as much bladder cancer as those in the lowest quarter. The food quantity in the two extremes was quite small, however, the equivalent of a single daily serving of spinach or a handful of almonds.

Foods rich in alpha-tocopherol include almonds, spinach, mustard greens, peppers, sunflower seeds, and oils including olive, cottonseed, and canola.

Exhaustion and heart risk

New research from the Netherlands shows that vital exhaustion (VE) can greatly increase the risk of having a first heart attack. VE symptoms are feelings of extreme fatigue, increased irritability, and defeat. People with VE have high levels of the blood-clotting protein fibrinogen throughout the day but especially in the morning.

Heart risk is increased at that time, say study authors at Maastricht University, partly because fibrinolysis, a process that breaks down blood clots, is at low levels early in the day. Normal exhaustion may last for a few hours, but VE can last a month or more.